Custom-built, four-channel variable DC power supply, used to power.Power Angel AC power meter, used to measure the power consumption Photoshop CS2 as an image manipulation benchmark. AMD Phenom II X2 565 Black Edition – 3.4 GHz, 45nm, 80WĬlassic – Home Cinema to play x264/MKV video using DXVA.Phenom II X4 840 processor – 3.2 GHz, 45nm, 95W
Windows 7 operating system – Ultimate, 64-bit Ideally we would run i5-2400 at the exact same voltage/speeds as the i5-2400S, but we weren’t able to match its odd Turbo Boost multipliers (+8, +7, +3, +1). It’s a simple thing to do, and may be a worthwhile alternative if it gives us similar results. To make things interesting, we will also undervolt the Core i5-2400 to approximately the same core voltage used by the i5-2400S by setting an offset voltage of -0.090V on our Asus P8P67 test board. The i5-2400 undervolted to the same core voltage as the i5-2400S, 1.080V according to CPU-Z. It turned out to be US$93 for AM3, US$119 for LGA1156, and US$139 for LGA1155. In the table above, we added the street price of the chips we’re comparing today with the average price of a compatible motherboard from Newegg (we chose Intel/Asus/Gigabyte/MSI DDR3 microATX and ATX models, omitting the most expensive/extravagant ones). You can’t discuss value without including motherboard cost, which varies from socket to socket. The CPU cost is only one part of the equation. This is a huge advantage compared to the i3-2100T which trails the i3-2100 by 600 MHz in all loads. This means the i5-2400S will only be slightly behind the i5-2400 in speed much of the time. The i5-2400S gets much larger bumps, 800 MHz for one core, 700 MHz for two cores, and 300 MHz for three cores. The i5-2400 has typical Turbo Boost speeds, overclocking by just 100~300 MHz depending on how many cores are active. The more intriguing part is the i5-2400S, as it is supercharged with very high Turbo Boost frequencies (this couldn’t not be done for the i3-2100T as i3 chips lack Turbo Boost altogether).